Two-fer Tuesdays: Who Better to Steal From?

A twice-monthly pairing of book covers that just seem to go together. Click on either of these images to open up an enlargement.



It wasn’t that unusual, during the mid-20th-century heyday of paperback covers, to see the same art employed on more than one book. (You’ll find numerous examples here.) Rather less common was to find illustrators refashioning their own work in order to use it more than once. Recently I discovered an example of the latter from the inventory of wondrous images left behind by Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka, about whom I’ve written more than once on this page.

The Chiriacka-painted cover on the left comes from the 1961 Beacon Books paperback By Love Depraved, described on its cover as “a bold new look at an old transgression ... portraying the frightening spread of lesbianism among the white women of modern-day Africa ...!” (Oh, horrors!) Its author was Arthur Aldon, who seems to have specialized in composing the sort of spicy paperbacks that once proliferated in the United States: his other titles included The Odd Kind (1962), The Wife Sharers (1963), The Lusting Three (1968), and Forbidden Ecstacy (1970). Click here to see Chiriacka’s original painting for the cover of By Love Depraved.

Now, do you see any resemblance between that paperback front and the one adorning Cult-Priest’s Daughter (right), a 1962 Beacon release by John Furlough? Yeah, I thought so.